Hi..
First of all I would like to thank all the people who contribute to this forum..Although my score is not as good but I would not have scored this much if I wouldn't have gone through this forum..Was mostly a silent member but still this forum helped me to a great extent. Probably this is my chance to contribute to the forum, so here it is.
GMAT Preparation
I joined a coaching center which was not much of help .Probably the faculty was not good and the material was more difficult than Kaplan..Though they provided 10 tests but it was much more difficult compared to what ETs had. Moreover, they did not make us pratice the process of elimination and at the end they expected us that we would be familiar with the technique. So I took up Kaplan, Princeton and
OG. Firstly , I went through Princeton. Got hang of some of the techniques not taught to us. Then, I started of with
OG(Verbal). Did 10 question of each part everyday. Got 50% right and 50% wrong. I tried my best in improving my scores. Finally, I found this forum which helped me improve my scores. I started doing decently in CR and SC... But what haunted me was Rc.. I tried various techniques given in various books but none helped. On the other hand, maths was pretty decent. Did pretty well in it. Then I took up Powerprep 1. As most of the questions were similar in what I encountered in
OG. I managed to score a 680.. This elevated my spirit.But it was shortlived...I gave Kaplan test got somewhere around 550-600.. I read somewhere in this forum that Kaplan was not representative of the actual scores and this calmed me down. Princeton on the other hand, I would get scores in the 640-660 range. I would suggest everyone the Princeton Verbal Review. It is very helpful specially for the Sentence Correction part.
After giving all these tests the thing I observed was that my maths was good but the verbal part killed me. And in verbal also, it was mostly RC which spoiled my score.. Still i decided to sit down for the test. Althoguh my test was schedule for the 28th of Spetember, but it got postponed to 3rd of October, as there was a strike in the place I live.
Test Day
I had gone a day early to check out my test center. They told me to come at 8:30 on the day when my test was scheduled. They did not allow me to enter the test center. However, the next day I went there at 8:30. They informed me that the center does not open until 8:55. Finally, after theeir day started and after the formalities I got my computer.. My heart started thumping. It started of with schools i want to send my score too.
AWA
AWA was decent. I had taken most of the ideas from Arco- Answer to the real GMAt essay Questions from Arco. It has answers to the 224 GMAT questions and I luckily managed to get from them.
Maths
Maths was also good. Got 3 probability questions. Got a question on sequence. Another on co-ordinate geometry. One question was to find out the powers in a factorial( Paul if you remember, I had suggested a quicker method for these kind of problem. You wouldn't believe it I got the same question). Also, there were similar questions which I encountered in this forum. Overall, the level of difficulty was not that great. I guess if you do Kaplan, it should be sufficient, as regards to the difficulty. Another thing I observed was that although I used to finish most of the test atleast 15 minutes before the time, I managed to finish this section with hardly 3 minutes to go.
English
Here comes the part which spoiled my day. It started of with a sentence correction question which I think I did correctly. I got lots of sentence correction questions which seemed easy( Probably I was not doing good). Then came the RC. It was a 40 lines Rc. I was so mentally exhausted that I could not concentrate on it. I tried hard looking for answers but it was all in vain. I knew I screwed up. Got around 4 passages. three of them were 40-lines and one 85 lines which I encountered in 35th question. Moreover, I did not get a single boldface question( Proabaly people who do good in the verbal section are the ones who get boldfaced questions). The CR was easy. Got 1 or two of them from the
OG itself, which confirmed that I was doing really badly.
SCORE
Anyways, I decided to check out my score. I thought maybe my maths would compromise for my English. After the survey, I clicked on the button to check out my score. There it was a 600. I was disheartened and a score of 36% in Verbal further disheartened me.
MISTAKES REALISED
I realised that though I did numerousy tests ( which included 800 score, ETS test paper, Priceton , Kaplan, Nova) and the
OG , I never reviewed my mistakes. I had answered the question in the
OG on a grid which allowed me to mark my mistakes, but still I felt lazy to review them. Moreover, I seriously needed to concentrate on the passage in the RC's. First get the gist of it, and then start answering the questions.
FUTURE PLANS.
Planning to give the GMAT once again in November, as my score is not sufficient for the colleges I am applying. Furthermore, noone would take me because of my poor Verbal score. Planning to go through the
OG once again. This time will make it a point to review my mistakes. Also planning to inmprove on my reading. Any suggestions for verbal will be welcomed.....